I don’t mean to start a trend with my last post mentioning the birthday of Henry Rollins, it was more of a coincidence since I had the idea for the post and then someone mentioned it so I posting it that day ties it all together. Like today someone mentioned it was Kurt Cobain’s birthday. He would have been 44. I’m not too good with remembering bdays in general, but the internet gives you less excuse to forget. I tend to think of Cobain on the anniversary of his death, April 4th. I was in the hospital at the time and heard about it on the radio my mother brought in. I hadn’t tried to kill myself, but I probably could have the way I was acting. Long story short, I was already not in the greatest of moods. No one at the hospital acknowledged it.

So I feel like mentioning it. I don’t like how people overstate or diminish his importance as a musician, or get way into the whole tragic romance thing of his death. He was like the guy, if you had serious depression issues, he was the King of Getting It. Even Trent Reznor’s schickt seemed like…schickt after a while. If this guy could get by, maybe you could too. Well, obviously he couldn’t. He even had a wife and kid and he still rocked. Seemed like a plausible model for “alternative” adulthood. Not necessarily mine, but the idea that you could grow up without growing out of everything you used to care about.

But he did stop caring, or cared way too much. Who knows. You can read whatever you want into it, but you are better off not. If you are fixated too much on Cobain and “alternative”, like nostalgia buffs and kids who were not even born then, you’re missing the bands that existed before that and kept going after. If you write off Nirvana entirely you are missing the big picture. They are a great gateway band if you start with them, and if you work backwards they tie a lot of threads together. “Alternative” never made sense as a musical movement. Ignore all the marketing terms. The only reason that term exists is that after Nirvana no one called themselves anything anymore. Like there were metalheads when I was a freshman in high school and people call themselves that now, but there were a few years there when it seemed like everyone listened to everything. But my memory gets a bit dodgy as I was on a whole lot of drugs. Don’t do drugs? I was on the good drugs not the Cobain drugs. What I’m saying is take the right amount of drugs. Shooting yourself in the head is definitely a bad idea in any circumstance. Most other things you could live to write a book about at least. Keith Richards is still alive writing books. Not that he shouldn’t be but there’s something deeply wrong about baby boomers still getting the last laugh in 2011. What the hell, Kurt?

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